


a fresh start, or something

by jack_inaboxx



Series: crack in the glass [12]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:33:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24562423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jack_inaboxx/pseuds/jack_inaboxx
Summary: Sometimes moving on feels like being set free.
Series: crack in the glass [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774129





	a fresh start, or something

( Inspired by an acoustic cover of the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons )

When he wakes up that day, the first day since he was twelve that they’ve all woken up together, he almost feels like they can do this. The hopelessness of the last year falls away, leaving him with a fire in his blood and a strength in his convictions he has not had for years. 

He is together with his family again, after being apart from them for so long. After not even knowing where half of them _were_ for so long.

His heart feels strangely full. 

Though he’s never been one for tearful reunions, or long goodbyes (or goodbyes at all, for that matter), he finds that he is not the only one who is grateful to have them all together again. He’s reaching out to touch, to hold, more in this one day than in the past week alone. 

Several times, he catches himself wondering when mother will come home. He stops this thought each time, buries it viciously in a landslide of work. If the others notice, they do not comment.

The second day is preparation. They have spent the first one tentatively reconnecting, remembering how they _are_. Digging up dusty, half-remembered thoughts, half-forgotten memories of each other. 

Once they remember those things, they work together almost frighteningly well. It’s as though they were never apart, sharing smiles and laughter over deadly weapons and refined nanokits. Even he takes part, sometimes. 

(Sometimes he notices them looking at him. He is not the same as they remember, he knows. None of them are, but he is perhaps the most different.)

The third day is waiting. They pass the time playing games, mostly hologames, but they dig out an old box with ‘Twister’ written on it from one of the closets on the upper level of the warehouse. Hana is surprisingly good at it. Lucas is terrible. He insists it’s because he isn’t built to stretch that way. They laugh.

The fourth day is when they come. The traps and ricocheting bullets take out half of them. The other half, he and Amara take care of. It’s what they’re good at. The other three pack up, getting everything out to the disguised hoverjet that they’d repurposed. Later, Nadia will confess that she made her third kill there. He is just glad that the others are there to comfort her; he does not know how. 

The fifth day, they are on the move. They can’t stay in Chicago anymore. Maybe they’ll go to New York. They’ve heard the Carpe Noctem members there are struggling. 

The fifth day, they spend singing terrible songs and making jokes that all of them groan at. Suddenly things do not seem so terrible. The world is ending, but they face it with a smile, and they face it _together_.

Nothing will tear them apart, not this time. 

He finds himself thinking, sometime in the early morning of the sixth day, when he is lying awake and listening to his family breathing around him, that maybe the world is ending. But he thinks that a new age is beginning. 

For all of them.


End file.
